Tara Duggan

The Climb

From 2021, Tara Duggan began as Deputy Food Editor at San Francisco Chronicle, a position that put her inside the daily mechanics of food coverage. The job demanded precision, but also an ear for how cooking and eating read on the page. Today, Tara is Staff Writer of San Francisco Chronicle, continuing in a register that stays grounded in reporting while remaining alert to the textures of food and beverages.

Today

She writes on food and beverages from San Francisco, working within a city that keeps the subject in motion. Her coverage sits where ingredients, technique, and taste meet, and where a piece can hold both information and feeling. From that base, Tara’s writing keeps its focus on detail, with an eye for the small distinctions that make food stories useful to other readers in the trade.

Signature

Tara's signature dishes include Steamed: A Catharsis Cookbook. The title points to a project organized around process and release, and to a form of making that treats recipes as more than instruction. That sensibility carries through her writing, which makes room for pacing, tone, and the work of noticing.

In Their Words “I’d been seeing biang biang noodles around on the internet. I happened to read that the name comes from the sound of banging the noodles, and thought, “Oh, that’s perfect!” “I enjoyed getting to write the recipes in a slightly different way, because recipe writing tends to be pretty formulaic.” Those lines show a writer interested in how language frames food before the first bite. The appeal of biang biang noodles, in Tara Duggan’s account, starts with the sound of the name as much as the dish. And the satisfaction of recipe writing, as she describes it, comes from pushing against formula without losing clarity. That balance between structure and room to move gives her food writing its shape.